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March 22
Menu: Czarina Soup; Guinea Hen, Roasted; Mashed Potatoes Creamed Onions; Dandelion Salad; Frozen Pudding Coffee Guinea Hen, Roasted-Truss 2 guinea hens, cover breasts with thin slices of bacon, and put in roaster and bake, basting often until tender. Remove bacon and brown. Melt in roasting pan 2 tablespoons Crisco, stir in 2 tablespoons flour, pour in gradually 2 cups scalded cream, and stir constantly. Strain, season with salt and white pepper, and, if liked, a tiny grain nutmeg, and pour this over guinea hens, or pass separately. Serve with these, potato balls of uniform size, which have been sauted in Crisco and sprinkled with chopped parsley.
A barded roast bird with a cream velouté made in the roasting pan. The instructions assume you know how long a guinea hen takes, which is the one thing worth pinning down.
- The hinge: guinea hen is leanGuinea fowl carries very little fat and dries out faster than chicken, which is why the breasts are covered with bacon. Keep the barding on for most of the roasting and pull the bird at 165F in the breast, 175F in the thigh.
- Times and temperatureThe recipe gives neither. Birds of about 2 to 2 1/2 lb each will take roughly 1 to 1 1/4 hours in a moderate oven (around 350F). "Remove bacon and brown" implies a short final spell uncovered in a hotter oven -- 10 to 15 minutes at around 425F works.
- RoasterIn 1913 a "roaster" is a covered metal pan, not an appliance. A heavy roasting pan works; if you use a lid or foil, take it off once the bird is nearly done so the skin can crisp.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening. Butter or oil substitutes directly in both the sauce roux and the potatoes; the book specifies Crisco because it was written to sell it.
- Scalded creamHeating cream to just below a simmer is often explained as a survival from the days of unpasteurised milk, and it still helps here: warm cream goes into a hot roux without seizing into lumps. Use whole cream, not half and half, or the sauce will be thin.
- Straining the sauceThe point is to catch the browned scraps and any flour lumps from the pan. Do not skip it if you have deglazed vigorously; grit in a white cream sauce is very obvious.
- Potato ballsCut with a large melon baller from peeled raw potatoes, then sautéed until golden and tender, 15 to 20 minutes over moderate heat. Parboiling for 3 minutes first shortens the pan time and gives an evener interior.
- YieldTwo guinea hens serve 4 to 6. Guinea fowl is now sold mainly by specialty butchers and online; a small chicken takes the same treatment, though the flavour is milder.
Guinea fowl (Numida meleagris) is an African bird, reintroduced to Europe by Portuguese traders in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and long kept on American farms as much for its shrieking alarm call as for the table. Its meat is darker and gamier than chicken and notably lean, which is why many historical recipes bard or lard it before roasting. This one comes from the "Calendar of Dinners" in The Story of Crisco, a 1913 promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening they had introduced two years earlier; the calendar assigned a menu to each date of the year. That the bird appears at all is a reminder that in 1913 a farmyard flock still supplied things a supermarket no longer stocks.